Capstone: A Cast of Characters


What is it?

As a born-and-raised Pokemon fan, I am well aware of the community surrounding it and the creative efforts people take part in to show their appreciation. The camps are generally split into two: The Pokemon people and the PMD people. The former like the mainline games, the mechanics, the competition; the latter, the story and setting. Sadly, only the mainline games seem to get regular installments, so I figure I'll bridge the gap a touch by designing a browser game that focuses on making Pokemon feel alive and unique. Conditional dialogue, lore-related reactions, preferences, all that jazz, to remind the Pokemon Company that there's more than just shiny hunting to be offered.

Also, it has shinies.

How does it work?

The short answer is it picks a pokemon and randomizes the randomizables to make unique characters,

The long answer is it takes 4 random numbers and assigns them to species, gender, Nature, and shiny values. The first grabs the details from the PokeAPI wrapper every time we tell it to load the guest generation subsection, and since the randint is established in it, it generates a random pokemon to grab the details of. These details are combed for the useful ones with a touch of extrapolation/simplification on things like stats. They're then assigned a slot in the SQL server so they can be retrieved in the rooms. The dialogue for characters is all pre-written to give a basic idea of the generated 'character' alongside the image and summary. Guests will leave after 3 days, both to fit the hotel theme and to encourage rotation of prompts.

Changelog

The Github used to host these files initially is at https://github.com/ZeitanDark/CreatingLife but it'll likely move after the project's done. There's a changelog of sorts on the website, but for convenience's sake, I'll put one here too.

August 24
- Project begins, Github is created and set up.
August 29
- Planning stages complete, minor delays as servers are set up and necessary libraries are accounted for.
August 30
- Libraries implemented/tested.
September 4th
- Initial Pokeapi integration; randomly generated Pokemon are assigned genders and their height, weight, and stats are collected from Pokeapi.
September 6th
- Initial integration for MySQL with Pokeapi's variables.
- Created basic site layout.
September 13th
- All useful variables are extracted from Pokeapi and passed into an array for storage.
- Natures and Genders are properly generated from given ratios.
- Using AJAX, the visitor can be regenerated without reloading the page in full.
November 15th
- Final draft uploaded
- Copious bug-testing and navigation fixes
- Finalized the mechanics of the site/interactions